Author's Note
This is a work of fiction inspired by Sara Weiss, née Sara McBride (1834-1904), a St. Louis Spiritualist, illustrator, and writer. Her book Journeys to the Planet Mars (1903) purports to be a memoir describing Weiss's psychic visits to the Red Planet, guided by the spirits of deceased scholars and family members. On Mars she meets the Entoans, a spiritually-bereft but kindly people living in a utopian society, to whom she reveals the existence of life after death.
I have long been fascinated by Weiss and the questions and contradictions she presents to the modern reader. She was raised in rural poverty with little education, yet wrote a long and imaginative work that is dense with astronomy, geology, linguistics, and zoology. She was a leader in her Spiritualist community but conformed to Victorian American ideals of motherhood and wifely devotion. Her authorial voice is wry and gently self-deprecating. She often refers to herself as a skeptic who reluctantly accepted Spiritualism only because of her lived experience.
To read Journeys today, with its illustrated flora of Mars and glossary of the Entoan language, is to conclude that she loved world-building, and knowingly wrote a work of fiction. Yet in interviews and letters, she asserts plainly that she was only a passive vessel for the creativity and wisdom of the honored dead.
In this book I explore the Sara Weiss of my imagination, one who embodies these contradictions and struggles with the complications that arise from them. The places she visited and the events she witnessed are reconstructed based on historical records and autobiographical clues in her writing; a more extensive biography is available at lizadaly.com/sara-weiss.
I hope the real Sara would forgive the flights of imagination I have taken here, and perhaps even find them familiar. They are meant to honor her story, and her strange and singular body of work.